|
From the Editor of PoLAR
This issue of PoLAR contains two sets of articles grouped thematically, along with the article that won the 2007 Student Paper Prize which is offered annually by the Association of Political and Legal Anthropologists. The first theme centers on the roles played by law and politics in the negotiation of insider and outsider status within minority communities. The second theme featured in this issue is the new focus on crime within anthropology, which has taken on added urgency and novel directions in recent years. First, we present two articles by younger scholars whose fresh outlook is characteristic of the interesting new work in the area. Then, we invited one of those scholars to interview two more senior, established experts in the area. The first part of the interview appears in the Directions section of this issue; the second part continues on the journal's webpage at http://www.aaanet.org/sections/apla/polar.html The first thematic section in this issue is entitled Outside, Inside: Jewish Politics, Islamic Law, and includes articles by Marcy Brink-Danan and Nahda Younis Shehada, The section begins with Brink-Danan's article, which focuses on the election and investiture of a new chief rabbi for the Jewish community in Turkey, where the majority population is Muslim. Through a combination of ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis, the article outlines how these linked events (election and investiture) provided an opportunity for Turkish Jews to publicly discuss what democracy means to them. This discussion has multiple audiences, and it provides a rich lens through which to view the dilemmas inherent in one minority's politics as it seeks to enter complex dialogues influenced by themes from EU and Islamist discourses. Shehada's article, on the other hand, discusses the way in which Islamic family law has evolved among Palestinians who live in Gaza. She contrasts a view from inside this sometimes-flexible system with accounts which have characterized the shari'a courts as increasingly inflexible, formal, governed by rigid laws. Where Brink-Danan describes the Turkish Jewish community's attempt to represent itself to the outside world, Shehada take us within a Palestinian community's internal world to show us a view that has been missed by some audiences. (See our "Spillover" section on this webpage for an exchange between Shehada and anthropologist Mike Fischer that further explores the question of writing for multiple audiences; here we have a reflexive opportunity to consider our own dilemmas in speaking to diverse audiences - an interesting counterpoint to Brink-Danan's discussion of Turkish Jews' approach to complicated audiences and discourses.) Law and politics in these articles provide resources for looking outward and inward as communities negotiate internal disputes and external change. A second pair of articles in this issue contributes to the growing anthropological literature on emergent configurations of authority and order within weakened states - configurations that often involve "criminal activity" of various kinds. In a section entitled Authority, Crime, and the State, we learn about the changing roles of drug traffickers in Brazilian favelas, and of caste leaders in one region of India . Ben Penglase's intriguing article shows us how non-state actors -- drug traffickers -- produce a state of "ordered disorder" in which their power grows relative to that of the Brazilian state. Rather than stepping into a void left by the state, as some would say, the traffickers in Penglase's study are instrumental in creating a permanent state of emergency -- while at the same time claiming to be the remedy for this lack of general security. A striking comparison arises when this account of local Brazilian law and politics is paired with Jeffrey Witsoe's study of caste and democratic politics in India. Rajput villagers say that they accede to the domination of a local gangster or "goonda" because he is "their gangster," a fellow Rajput - and thus offer protection from gangsters of other castes. But "goondas" also openly participate in formal politics, often occupying official political positions. Thus there are parallels between the informal networks identified as "criminal" that are described in these two articles -- but they also occupy different positions vis-à-vis historical and ongoing struggles over empowerment for traditionally oppressed or marginalized groups. For readers interested in the questions raised by recent anthropological studies of crime, our Directions section continues the discussion. It features an interview of Stephanie Kane and Philip Parnell, co-editors of Crime's Power: Anthropologists and the Ethnography of Crime (2003), a major anthropological reader on this subject. The interview was conducted by Penglase. The last part of this interview will be appearing in a "spillover" section on PoLAR's website, which invites our readers to participate in an ongoing discussion. PoLAR's webpage will also be offering links to bibliographies and course syllabi, where available, on topics pertaining to our spill-over sections. You are invited to join us at: http://www.aaanet.org/sections/apla/polar.html The final article in this issue, by Mark Schuller, was the winner of the 2007 APLA Student Paper Prize. Schuller discusses the role of NGOs in Haiti, detailing four ways in which NGOs there function to "glue" globalization. Despite their overt goals of serving less-privileged members of society, NGOs wind up functioning as buffers between their professed beneficiaries and elites, reproducing class divisions as they undermine Southern states' own capacities to provide for their citizens. Yet, Schuller notes, there is variation in the degree to which NGOs serve these functions; through a focus on their varying practices, he outlines how two different NGOs in Haiti diverge in the degrees to which they serve "gluing" functions. In this issues' articles, we see one potential gift of anthropology in today's increasingly connected world - that it provides a perspective not found in other social sciences in the United States (apart, perhaps, from qualitative sociology as it ventures outside of the U.S.). There is arguably a preference in U.S. policymaking circles for quantitative research based in economics and political science, a preference that reaches even to today's legal scholarship and law training. Ironically, this is paired with a great deal of rhetoric about the need to adjust to a global world in which transnational norms and economic ties are becoming ever more important. Yet the scholarly fields with the most experience in interpreting across such global arenas do not seem to translate well in the corridors of power. To what degree this is an insoluble problem - or a problem at all - seems to be a point on which well-respected anthropologists disagree. But for those (whether inside or outside of anthropology) who are interested in formulating policies that take account of the needs and perspectives of the world outside of the United States, anthropology has a great deal to offer in comparison to the other U.S. social sciences. Take, for example, anthropological research demonstrating the paradoxical consequences of some Western interventions purportedly designed to empower and help people struggling with poverty across the globe. Such interventions on the part of organizations like NGOs and international financial institutions (the World Bank, the IMF) often wind up further undermining disempowered people at the local level - and among the social sciences, it has been anthropology that has led the way in documenting and analyzing this process. (Recent PoLAR examples include Anders 2008 and Schuller 2009; an upcoming special issue of PoLAR will be devoted to the question of NGOs.) More generally, an informed engagement with anthropological research can help correct a tendency on the part of Western legal scholars and politicians to understand global dilemmas through Western-centric paradigms. There have been some efforts in recent years to move beyond narrow "rational actor" models in the forms of economics being absorbed by U.S. legal and political elites. However, this is a very elementary step by comparison with methods available through our own field of anthropology. And, of course, these anthropological methods are subject to constant, vigorous internal critique - perhaps, however, to the point where they seem entirely discredited to audiences in other fields (unaware of the fact that these same critiques would discredit still further the interview, survey, experimental, and other techniques used by the remaining social sciences). Somewhere between informed critique, on the one hand, and a reasoned assessment of the relative benefits of inevitably partial and flawed sources of information, on the other hand, may lie a place where anthropology can make peace with its own fierce self-criticism, and emerge to make a more vigorous contribution to public and "scientific" discourses in these times. The articles in this issue contain insights that would not be obtainable from techniques designed to yield only quantitative results. This is not to dismiss quantitative research per se, which also has a place in research on large scale societies and international phenomena) However, qualitative anthropological insights, such as those reported in this issue, arguably reflect as sound an "empirical" base as those emerging from studies from other fields which employ different sorts of methodologies. References Cited
Previous Issues
|
|
